Verified Twitter Users: Who Are They?

During your time on Twitter, you’ll probably have seen at least one verified account. Yes, similar to Facebook, verified accounts are those with the little blue checkmark symbol. But who are these people? How many are there? A recent report by Triggertrap CEO Haje Jan Kamps give us a good look at them. Aren’t you curious?

The first thing I found rather surprising is that there are apparently only around 150,000 verified users on Twitter. If you think that there are several hundred million users on Twitter currently, those that are verified are part of a pretty exclusive little club. According to Twitter itself (it’s actually pretty obvious), they are “highly sought users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business and other key interest areas”. Whoever is very famous probably needs to be verified, for security reasons alone. What Haje found in his study though, is that nearly half of the verified users are journalists and sports figures.

Yes, you heard right… In fact, 25% of these users are actually journalists, and another 18% of them are sports figures and teams. As we all know, Twitter is perfect for news-gathering and dissemination, so it’s really no surprise. Have a look at the general make-up in the chart below.

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But, there’s also politicians, various other celebs, musicians, bands, companies, organisations… In general, verified accounts are very active, but don’t necessarily have an enormous amount of followers. And the amount of followers they do have, is directly linked to how famous they are… Simple.

FOLLOWERS

They are certainly heavy Twitter users though, and extremely active. Judging by the fact that musicians and bands are often those accounts with the most followers, it’s also a bit surprising that only 12% of verified accounts come from this category. The number of followers for those in the “music” category is over 1m whereas the “journalists” category the average number of followers is 140k! So, yes… Followers come with fame.

FRIENDS

But what about the amount of accounts they themselves follow. Again, the highest seems to be the music category. Other notable examples are politicians and businesses. No connection to fame. The most verbose accounts belong to media. Again, no surprise here.